Deeply Odd (30 page)

The task that I needed to perform was the same task that I had needed to perform since I first saw that vision of burning children earlier in the day. The thing to understand is that you have to do what you have to do, always and without complaint.

That’s the way.

IN THE THIRD-FLOOR HALLWAY, THE CEILING LIGHTS were cycling brighter, dimmer, brighter, but there wasn’t another pretty, yellow-eyed chin-licking Goth-girl maniac or the equivalent waiting for me. That seemed to be a good sign.
Stay positive
.

I returned to Room 4, opened the door this time, and walked boldly into the temporary prison where the seventeen children were being watched over by two men.

When I saw that a felt-tip pen had been used to draw a line of hieroglyphics across the brow of each child, I recalled the severed heads in the breakfronts, and had to remind myself to stay positive. But the abhorrence, the hatred of corruption and the detestation of those who ate at the trough of corruption, which I would need if I were to lead the captives safely out of here, did not need to be ginned up; I was almost wild with a righteous hatred and knew that I must get a leash and muzzle on it to avoid reckless action that would ensure the children’s death and mine. I dared not let a trace of contempt color my voice or a shadow of loathing darken my face.

The two guards were absurdly handsome, coiffed as if they had a fetish for hair. They looked like Ken dolls that had been infused
with life by a malevolent force, had dismembered Barbie, and had come here to take vengeance on these children for having spent years, as dolls, being dressed up in outfits that humiliated them.

The only pieces of furniture in the room were two straight-backed chairs. There were two floor lamps with pleated-silk shades, one in each half of the room, and they throbbed like the lights in the hallway and in Room 6. One of the Kens, a blond hunk with chiseled features, sat in a chair, holding a cattle prod across his lap. He wore a sweater that depicted Kermit the Frog in a Santa hat, overlaid with a shoulder holster and pistol.

“Contumax,”
I said, pumping my fist in the air.

The other Ken, who wore a Rudolph sweater and also had a gun in a shoulder rig, stood at the window, on the farther side of the large room, watching the preparations for the festivities. He resembled the actor Hugh Grant if Hugh Grant were like three times better-looking than he’d been in his prime. If the two Kens had been close together, I would have been sure of dropping them without taking return fire, but this situation made me nervous. Besides, I didn’t want to shoot at a guy standing by the window, in case I blew out one of the panes and alerted the people on the deck below.

Ken #2 answered my
“Contumax”
with
“Potestas”
and a lame fist pump, but Ken #1 just wanted to know when the fornicating action was going to fornicating begin, though the word he used wasn’t
fornicating
. I said that my name was Lucius and I was from Arizona. Indicating my weaponry, I said that I was part of the show tonight, that I was a friend of Jinx’s, and that we were looking for her, because the action couldn’t begin without her. Ken #2 said that Jinx was probably outside somewhere, getting it on with one of the Dobermans, and Ken #1 said he couldn’t wait to see the show that witchy bitch was going to put on, she was always over
the top, whereupon Ken #2 said Jinx had superdelicious mammaries, with megabounce, though he didn’t use the word
mammaries
. Ken #1 said that he liked her mammaries
and
her cool black fingernails but that the yellow contact lenses were just vampire-movie stupid, and Ken #2 agreed that the contacts were stupid and said that the only mammaries more superdelicious than Jinx’s were Nedra’s, to which Ken #1 replied that he shouldn’t have eaten those fornicating wasabi shrimp because now he had fornicating heartburn, by which time I realized that even head-collecting satanists who performed human sacrifices and who lived without rules could be dull conversationalists.

The captives sat on the floor, in a large semicircle, the three Payton children among them, all ten years old or younger, eight boys and nine girls. Some were numb with terror, some twitchy, and others appeared to be emotionally drained, exhausted. They must have cried themselves dry. Two had a sullen and defiant attitude; they might have resisted or tried to flee and been badly hurt, except that each of the seventeen was firmly linked to the next, wrist to wrist, with eighteen-inch lengths of tightly knotted red-satin ribbon, and this chain-gang arrangement hampered them.

The lights stopped pulsing. Whatever presence had disturbed the night by its approach had fully arrived, and the night had adjusted to it.

Annoyed with me even though I had been entirely cordial, Ken #1 said, “Listen, man, I’ll tell you what I told the others who’ve come sniffing around. We can’t let you take one of these [fornicating] little muffins into the [fornicating] bathroom for a taste. They have to be pure … for later. Besides, they’ve all just had a piss before we tied them, and now we can’t untie any ’cause soon, when
we hear the gong, we have to lead them out to the [fornicating] stage.”

“Her or him,” Ken #2 said.

Ken #1 said, “What?”

“Her or him,” Ken #2 repeated. “We can’t let Lucius here get it on with one of the girls
or
one of the boys.”

“Man, that’s exactly just what I said,” Ken #1 declared, further annoyed.

“No, what you told him was that we can’t let him take
her
into the bathroom for a taste.”

After a few words of blasphemy, Ken #1 said, “
Him
was implied when I said
her
.”

“Maybe you implied it, but maybe he didn’t infer it.”

“What the hell’s that mean?” Ken #1 asked. “When I said ‘taste,’ I didn’t mean taste, either, but Lucius knew what I was implying.” He looked up at me. “Didn’t you [fornicating] know what I was implying?”

“Absolutely. But that’s not what I came here for.”

Ken #1’s sneer was sharp enough to peel an apple. “Yeah, right.”

“No, really. Rob sent me up here to do something.”

“Rob who? There’s ninety people here tonight, and I know like three Robs. There’s at least twenty people I haven’t met before, and for all I know every [fornicating] one of them is Rob.”

Ken #2 said, “Except Rob Cornell is actually Robert, but he just doesn’t like Bob, so he calls himself Rob.”

Before Ken #1 could employ his profane vocabulary even more colorfully than before, I said to the Ken at the window, “I’ll need your help with this.”

“With what?”

“With what Rob Burkett sent me up here to do.”

Stepping away from the window, Ken #2 said, “Why didn’t you say Rob Burkett in the first place?”

Getting up from his chair, cattle prod in his right hand, Ken #1 said, “Shit, Lucius, you know how Rob is. He’s an office guy, not a field guy. He wouldn’t have known what to do if he’d been there in Vegas last night. So it got messy. But we still got those four kids.”

I remembered what Chet, the customer in the diner, told us: The kidnappers in Vegas murdered the parents to get their four children.

Looking concerned as he joined us, Ken #2 said, “Who would’ve thought a milksop Baptist minister and his wife would be carrying concealed weapons?”

Ken #1 sought my sympathy: “Hey, man, the TV news said that [fornicating] preacher and that bitch wife of his had
permits
to carry. What kind of crazy government bureaucrat asshole licenses [fornicating] preachers to walk around with [fornicating] pistols under their suit coats?”

“Good thing,” said Ken #2, “the preacher didn’t realize there were two of us.”

“Good thing,” Ken #1 agreed. “A preacher ought to know the Bible says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

“Actually,” I corrected, “if you go back to the root language of the original commandments, it said ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ but over the millennia and through a lot of translations, it ended up saying ‘kill.’ ”

Puzzled, Ken #2 said, “Murder or kill, kill or murder, what the hell’s the difference?”

“Anyway,” I said, “Rob is cool with Vegas. It turned out all right, and we have four juicy preacher kids raised pure, the way we need them to be. He sent me up here to do this thing with the little darlings.”

“What thing?” both Kens asked.

Winking at them, I said, “You’re going to like this.”

Inside of me there seemed to be a butterfly farm where two thousand wings fluttered out of a thousand split cocoons all at once.

These kids would have to live with this trauma all the days of their lives, and I didn’t want to do anything that would leave them with even darker memories of these events.

Turning to the captives, I remembered that Mr. Hitchcock had said they didn’t know what was going to happen to them, that the cultists wanted to surprise the remaining sixteen when the first of them was slashed or chopped, or hammered. “Listen up, kids. It’s going to take another day or two for the ransom to be paid, and we can’t let you go until then.”

One of the two that had an openly defiant attitude, a girl of nine or ten, with a blond ponytail and celadon eyes, said, “That’s a crock of horseshit.”

“Well, personally, I don’t use that kind of language,” I told her, “though I can understand why you might feel the way you do. But the truth is, we know you’re bored, and since there are a few people here who’re magicians, we’re going to put on a show for you kids in a little while.”

“That’s more horseshit,” the girl said.

Because I was standing a step in front of the Kens, I was able to wink at her without them seeing what I did. She frowned, not sure what to make of the wink.

I said, “We need one of you to be on stage to assist one of the magicians with a few totally amazing tricks. It’ll be really cool.”

One sweet-faced boy of about six raised his hand and said, “I’ll do it.”

“I’m sorry, son, but I’m not asking for a volunteer. We’re going to play a fun game, and the winner gets to help the magician. First I need all of you to close your eyes. Come on, now. Close them. Close them tight. You, too. That’s right, that’s good. You have to keep them closed through the whole game, until I tell you to open them.”

I drew one of the Glocks, turned, and shot Ken #1 in the head. His eyes weren’t closed, of course, but they didn’t even have time to widen in recognition of what was happening.

Ken #2 must have been thinking about superdelicious mammaries, because he was slower on the draw than I expected, and I shot him point-blank in the face and throat before he could get his piece out of his shoulder rig. Just to be sure about Ken #1, I leaned down to where he’d fallen and popped him again.

Every shot was a
whifff
, but the bodies made some hard sounds when they hit the carpet, so I said, “Keep your eyes closed, kids. Keep them closed really tight.”

The butterflies in my stomach were snakes now, slippery masses of serpents squirming over one another.

I knelt beside the first Ken, looked into his eyes, and then pulled his Kermit the Frog sweater over his face like a shroud, to conceal his wounds. I looked in the second Ken’s eyes and drew his Rudolph sweater over his face, as well.

I thought that I heard a noise in the hallway. I froze, stared at the door, waiting for a knock or for the knob to turn. Nothing happened.

In the farther half of the room, there might be chunks of skull and worse. I turned to the kids to be sure that they had their eyes shut, and they all did, except for the girl with the ponytail. Her stare was wide and gray-green and bright.

“Keep your eyes closed,” I told the others. “We’re almost ready to begin the game.”

I went to the lamp that cast light into that part of the room where debris had fallen. I yanked its plug from the wall receptacle.

Returning to the kids, I said, “When you open your eyes, try not to look too close at things. There’s no reason to look close. Okay, you can open them.”

They stared at the dead men. Some of them—but not most—looked away. A few started to cry, but I gently shushed them.

“I’m going to take you out of here and home again,” I told them. “But you have to be quiet, very quiet, and do exactly what I say.”

The girl with the ponytail stared intensely at me, as if she were a living polygraph. She nodded. To the others, she said, “Do what he tells you. If he has to, he’ll die for us.”

The crying children wiped at their eyes, choked back their sobs.

I smiled at the girl. “No horseshit, huh?”

“Zero,” she said.

INITIALLY, I THOUGHT THAT THE CHILDREN SHOULD be untied or the ribbons cut, but I quickly realized the advantage of leaving them tethered to those on both sides of them, wrist to wrist. If suddenly they were spooked by something, they could not scatter in a panic. I was more likely to be able to protect them if they remained together, less likely to lose one who, in unthinking terror, might run and hide.

I went once more to the window, to assess quickly the state of things.

Directly overhead, the architecture of the now-parched storm continued to come apart. Through holes in the roof of clouds, more stars appeared moment by moment, as if those distant suns were just now being born by the thousands.

Over the lake or where the lake had been, that
other
sky, awful and without one flicker, concealed beneath it what had come from some malignant shore to this one. Dark forms, moving and threatening within a deeper darkness, defied the eye and would not be defined.

As I have explained in previous volumes of this memoir, there are other spirits that I sometimes see in addition to those of the lingering dead, though they might never have been human at any stage of their existence. I call them bodachs because, when visiting Pico Mundo many years earlier, an English boy who apparently had talents akin to mine and who could also see these spirits called them bodachs just before he was crushed to death by a runaway truck. They are as insubstantial as fumes but not transparent, instead soot-black and without features, sinuous. Although they can’t pass through walls as ghosts can, they are able to slip through any crevice or crack, or keyhole. Their silhouettes suggest wolf and human both. They slink and slouch, glide and slither, and they have an interest in certain people, especially in those who will soon die by violence and also in those who will murder them.